


Radio to the Youth

by Scappodaqui



Series: Radio [1]
Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Japanese Internment, Mentions of Violence, POV Jim Morita, Period-Typical Racism, Radio Nerdery, Radio Propaganda, Second Person, WW II History
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-09-03
Packaged: 2018-04-06 13:12:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4223013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The idea of America rides on radio waves, chasing itself across the plains like wind whipping through wheat, and sometimes there’s a storm. </i> </p><p>Or: Jim Morita, before and during the war, and before and after he meets Captain America. (And teaches him to start a tractor.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Radio to the youth is the best possible foundation of the future self made man,” reads the magazine _Radio News_. Your father, who must have gone to some trouble to get it, nods and slides it over to you on the breakfast table so you can see. He sees how, at ten years old, you’re fascinated by the workings of things, the questions you ask about electricity and engines. He jokes that soon you’ll figure out how to fix the new tractor.

He’s a self-made man. He and your uncle scraped together enough money to lease the farm after they’d worked out here for years.

You first hear the radio on your cousin Chiyo’s crystal set. Then you get your own, a shiny box on the mantle. The broadcasts are dreams that filter into your house: music and vaudeville, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, a program called Great Moments in History that at one point features a down-home version of Paul Revere. Your mother carefully turns the dial every evening and lets you pick the station, as Davey is too young to care. You care less about the station and more about the fact of it, music floating invisibly all around you. 

So you start to build your own radios, too. Get some of the first vaccuum tubes and put up an antenna, with the help of your father, along one wall of the hay barn. You get to hear clear voices from everywhere, call signs from all over the country. Europe, even, and New Zealand.

By 1940 the tractor’s not the problem anymore and you rent a threshing machine, too. It’s probable you’re going to marry Mika Watabe. Your father has arthritis in his hands. At night you still listen to the radio.

Your brother Dave is 15 when you hear about Pearl Harbor.

He brings his violin and when they dump it out to inspect your luggage one of the strings breaks with a dull twang, frequency 196 cycles per second. He’s a sensitive kid even though he was on the football team back home and he almost cries, because he forgot to pack his spare strings while he was saying goodbye to the dog.

The idea of America rides on radio waves, chasing itself across the plains like wind whipping through wheat, and sometimes there’s a storm. 

So you volunteer as soon as they’re taking anyone and in training you simultaneously piss off and impress the sergeant with your competence. You learn how to salute just fast enough, not too fast, not too eager, and to keep your face locked down deadpan. They pick you out and ask you a lot of questions to make sure you aren’t fifth column, what with all that knowing Morse code and how to put together a shortwave radio from scrap. You explain it simply. Radio News and the best possible foundation for a self-made man. The colonel _laughs_. 

But for some godforsaken reason they put you in a mixed regiment and say, “Have at it, cowboy.” You don’t have the heart to explain you farmed wheat, not cattle. It’s true you’re quick on the draw, don’t say much, and chew gum like tobacco. Our California cowboy, that’s what the guys in your unit call you. From some of them it’s fond and from some of them it comes with a sting like spilled battery acid. You work the radio and they train you up as a medic after learning how you used to help the local doctor out on rounds. 

In the holding cells in Kreischberg you meet Sergeant Barnes. He looks out for the ones who don’t seem like they’re going to make it, and sure enough, most don’t. When some guy dies he goes nuts, gets himself beat up by the guards, but not before he takes out one of them with his own baton. He’s cracking jokes when you try to clean him up after. You have a feeling he’s not going to last long. 

When Captain America comes to the rescue you’re a little skeptical.

You ask Barnes, who knows him somehow, who the hell is this guy, is he the one in the _comics_ (as you’ve [seen](http://41.media.tumblr.com/51e4ee7979d99c2fb1b14b24925fa87b/tumblr_nf5h89F4VP1tmzl4oo1_500.jpg) [those](http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/13-4.jpg) and they aren’t fit to wipe your ass on, all yellow-faced demons and this lug in a flag gleefully throwing bombs on them.) You want to ask Barnes how he’s still alive but he has a haunted, wrecked expression on that tells you he’s not quite sure.

He assures you that this guy is not Captain America. Well, he is, but he’s Steve Rogers, for godsakes, the guy’s Irish, he drew pictures for pro-integration pamphlets, has he even seen those comics? 

Captain America turns out to have busted up his radio in the fight and even you can’t fix it, though Barnes suggests you try. He’s like that, Barnes, remembers what everyone’s good at and makes suggestions so you feel useful. 

Looking at that radio, you wonder what happened that could melt steel casing like that, but leave Captain America just fine. 

Later you talk to the Captain about the comics and, even though you think it’s a bit of a waste of time, he writes long, angry letters to the publishers. And then, after a few weeks on base, Cap talks to Colonel Phillips, who grumbles and pulls strings and gets your little brother out of the Poston camp and into Oberlin so he can study music like he wants to. And that’s when you think, all right. Captain _America._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Started out as notes on a longer fic and I just decided to post it on its own, since people on tumblr seemed to enjoy it.  
> Fresno really did have a lot of wheat farms and I headcanon Morita as actually third-generation American in a family of itinerant farmers who arrived in the 1880s and worked their way up.  
> Technically ties in to the world of [If neither foes nor friends can hurt you](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3989410/chapters/8956966) and may explain some of Bucky's friendship with Morita that goes mostly unsaid there, but it stands on its own.  
> I really want to keep writing about Morita, so comments, suggestions, and concrit about historical accuracy or cool facts are welcome.


	2. Chapter 2

In the field you hear the war crashing all around you. Not just in your own fights--in reality your missions are mainly covert. On the radio, though, you can hear the larger currents of the very large war. You listen all the time, whenever you can, running up the antenna on pauses in the march. You may not say much (transmitting on the radio is pretty much guaranteed to bring Jerry down on you eventually), but you listen plenty.

You hear:

Codes and languages you don’t know across many frequencies. Jones has the key to some of the Germans’ and you’re able to figure out their troop movements nearby.

Shortwave propaganda broadcasts from Germany. Friendly Americanized voices telling you stories of what they believe to be your country. See, they’ve obviously heard the American radio shows talking about the girls back home. They figure what you Americans want  
is the girl next door and your mother’s apple pie. The problem is that the Nazis have no concept of irony. Axis Sally describes the streets of New Orleans and how the boys who were declared 4-F will fool around with all your women. Like that’s what any of you are worried about. 

What _you_ think about, listening to German propaganda, is Charlie Chaplin. Before you had to leave home you saw a film called _The Great Dictator_. It’s Chaplin’s first real talkie. In it, Chaplin plays both a Jewish barber and the ersatz Hitler his mustache evokes. They’re mirror images of each other. They look the same. The world turned on its axis and set against itself. 

At the end Chaplin says, “The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood for the unity of us all.”

Because of that, the German radio propaganda makes you laugh. It makes you laugh like the colonel laughed at you when you talked earnestly about the saving power of radio. It makes you laugh out of wry surprise. At the depth of the human wellspring. At the infinite potential for absurdity. It gives you a strange kind of hope. Hearing German voices talk about how the Allied empires will collapse, hearing them singing ‘Big Bad Wolf’. Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Who’s afraid? Not you. And all their seriousness of purpose as the German band Charlie and His Orchestra tries to imitate American jazz and jive (you’ve learned about jive talk from Jones)--

The German broadcasters are just dumb little Hitlers pretending to be Charlie Chaplin. Charlie Chaplin can pretend to be Hitler, but it doesn’t work the other way around. You can tell even they don’t believe what they’re saying. You know who owns the radio waves: nobody. The radio waves are free.

The radio waves are free and--

And from the American side, you hear not just Rex Stout’s show _Our Secret Weapon_ , from back home, a reply to some of the craziest German lies. But also: “You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap.” “Let’s Nip the Nipponese.” At that, you don’t laugh. Americans _are_ good at irony. But it’s not the radio that’s the problem, it’s that you just have to trust how, in the end, after the war, you’ll go home to somewhere that’s free. Mostly free. At least from two hundred meters on down, the frequencies allowed to amateur operators. Your room to breathe. To listen. To speak.

Silence. What the Nazis want to own isn’t the radio waves, it’s silence, really.

The Nazis jam many of the field broadcasts sent by the small portable radios, not as sophisticated as yours, that most ground troops carry (the walkie-talkies have a range of only one mile, the larger radios in most units, just five). Radio jammers send out loud sounds that swamp your frequencies, fighting for the same waves.

Much as the Allies behind enemy lines successfully transmit, the Germans hunt down plenty. They have direction finders as well as the British do (and you know your side has turned most of the German operators after finding them, but the Germans simply kill yours). They run up loops in the air to catch your signals.

For the Nazis, radio transmissions are like blood leaking out in the water in front of sharks. The radio waves in this war are bloody. They run red. Although you listen constantly, you yourself transmit only when you have to, or when you are on the move and impossible to track. You and Jones arrange rotating codes with Agent Carter and you do not transmit on the same wavelength every time. Others are sloppier, but they don’t know any better, or they can’t manage the time to be more careful. Not as many people are trying to keep them safe. They’re not with Captain America. 

The lone radio operators in the field, those who send transmissions. They’re some of the bravest of you, men and women making an invisible chain stronger than that of the Axis, all across German-occupied Europe. In France you communicate with an operator who goes by the name of Marie. You and Dernier make sure to hear her transmissions to coordinate explosives transport. And one day she doesn’t make the transmission time. Not the next either. So you listen to the static and salute. The Germans have found her. It’s happened before, it will happen again. 

Freedom’s enemy is silence.

The Allies have finally managed to get radio waves to Japan, you learn. After the mid-July 1944 capture of Saipan, not short but medium waves reach across the Pacific. You haven’t heard much about Saipan yet, except that you won. You will, later.

Sometimes, you hear Allied POWs on the air, captives of the Germans who are allowed to speak. They give their names and their serial numbers. When they send out messages home confirming they’re all right (whether or not you personally believe it) you scramble for paper and write it down, so you can send word to their families once you return to base. God knows, you’d want someone to do that for you.

Your own family is out of the camps, even your cousins. Your mother and father have been set up with work at the Sun Ship Company in Pennsylvania, courtesy of the U.S. Army. You hope they’re okay. Sometimes you wonder if the barbed wire fences, the camps--were just as much to keep them safe. You know there’ve been riots. _Let’s Nip the Nipponese_. _War of the Worlds_ type shit, the panic out on the coast when people saw lights floating over the ocean near Los Angeles after Pearl Harbor. They thought the lights were Japanese bombers. Then they thought they were aliens. Lightning-crazed radio waves, that night, lights on the horizon and fear. A storm. 

No. When your brother wrote you he said the student body president at Oberlin is Nisei himself. Your brother plays on the football team. He says they showed a newsreel of Captain America before a double feature in town and that he’s popular because people know you’re part of Captain America’s Howling Commandos. He’s fine, for now, and probably your parents are, too.

Two of your cousins have joined up, in a Nisei unit, of course. For now you have to fight for it, for--universal brotherhood. You’re not fool enough to think you’ll get that, or anything perfect. Just: freedom, from two hundred meters on down. 

One day in the France near Le Muy, August ‘44, you’re running through different frequencies and you hear an SOS. An American paratrooper. He says weakly that he has been blown far east of the rest of his troop and landed in a camp of German soldiers. You know they’d been parachuting into France to help with the southern beach landings, Operation Dragoon. SOS he says in English, ess oh ess, he doesn’t know Morse Code, he says, “Please help me, they’re all dead, I shot ‘em. I’m hurt. Private Paul Welch, 17649465, 517th PIR.” 

You keep going because you must. But an hour later, while the rest of the Commandos dig into rations and you take your food after Monty brings it over to you, you tune in again to hear the same message, stating location about eight miles south of of Le Muy. That’s near where you are now. He hasn’t been found, or at least maybe the Germans don’t want to bother with a lone felled parachuter. You chomp hard at the piece of gum from your ration packet. You bite your tongue, and taste blood.

You have a mission, Hydra technology en route to the German lines fourteen miles away. Rescuing this man, who may be doomed, would mean taking a significant detour. It could even be some sort of trap. But you’re an army medic as well as a Commando. And you don’t want to leave this man to silence. You spit out your bloody wad of gum, take a deep breath, and decide to talk. You pose the dilemma to Captain Rogers and await his response.

Captain Rogers, without questioning the necessity of an operation meant to rescue one man who might soon be dead anyway, says, “We’ll have to get there fast.”

You radio back since you’re on the move anyway. You tell him to set off his flare as soon as you’re close so you can find him and you give the Allied password, bluebird. “Hang in there. We’re coming. Jim, over and out.”

You pass a bombed-out farmhouse and outside of it is a tractor, a damn Austin tractor out here in France. Rusty and run into a big patch of weeds, but unharmed. The jeep you’d been riding in got shot up last night when you ran into a German troop, so you’ve been walking. Anything you can get would speed you up and the Austin is in lousy shape but it’s better than nothing. You say, “Hey, city boy.” Because Cap doesn’t mind you talking to him that way, sometimes. All of you can get a little casual. It’s a small unit. “Want to learn to start a tractor?”

There’s a full gas can near the tractor, half-buried in a shallow hole in the dirt near the intact barn wall (miracle # 217 of your experience at war, not that you’re counting). You fill the tank. 

The Commandos gather around you while you work on the temperamental engine. Starting a tractor at the best of times back home was the subject of much superstition. Engines, like radio, like the complex machinery inside of a man--all require a little prayer to work. This one might take miracle # 218.

“Anyone wanna give me a hand?” you ask.

“I’ve never started a tractor in my life,” Monty says, shrugging. Jones shakes his head.

Barnes and Rogers look at each other. Brooklyn. It taught them to fight all right, but not how to use farm machinery--though Captain Rogers is awfully fond of his motorcycle.

“I used to pull a tractor in the circus,” Dugan says. Stories of his strongman exploits have made campsite evenings interesting, but he is prone to exaggeration. Probably he pulled a cart. You figure the circus is where he learned to bluff so well at poker--playing against showmen and all. Either that, or he keeps aces in that hat.

Dernier takes a step forward. He’s the only damn one. Well, it is his country, even if the tractor’s an American model, and his family grew up on the land, too. “If it doesn’t go, you must to put a fire under it,” he says.

“Not a chance,” you say, imagining the complications that could result from this plan.

“To thin the oil,” he insists. “ _Il faut couler._ ” He’s impatient. He wants to go. This mission is important to him.

“Non, mer-see,” you say (which still sounds like ‘no mercy’ to you). You want to make this work without the risk of blowing yourselves sky-high.

You make a second attempt on your own. You crank the engine cautiously, reset the gas lever, try again. The engine coughs and grumbles to life. Dernier looks vaguely disappointed. 

“ _Ne t’inquiète pas_ ,” Jones tells him, “You’ll have plenty of chances to light stuff up that isn’t our ride.”

Before you leave, Captain Rogers carefully writes a note in French, with the stub of his drawing pencil: a receipt for the tractor to be repaid by Uncle Sam. He leaves it folded up under the empty gas can. It’s a nice thought.

You barrel through the countryside clinging to that poor Austin tractor for dear life, the Commandos in the cart towed behind you and Captain Rogers riding alongside on his motorcycle, sometimes speeding ahead to clear obstacles. You must look ridiculous. Sergeant Barnes picks off a couple German snipers in trees you could swear no one could see, much less shoot while hanging on the back of a creaky big-wheeled unwieldy monster of a machine.

When you show up where the flare went off, you see a bunch of dead Germans piled up around the dead black remains of a fire and a guy with his crumpled, bloody parachute packed into a gunshot wound in his stomach. He’s dragged himself so his back is up against a tree and his face is dirty with soot and ashen with blood loss and red all down one side. He looks up at you when you get there and sees Captain America over your shoulder, with his shield and stars and stripes. The kid’s fingers are on the trigger of his rifle, though his hands are limp and shaky, so he looks like he’d be too weak to shoot. But he’s aiming at you, steady enough, with the last strength in him. 

You hold up your medical kit and say, “It’s Jim.”

And he’s got this confused look on his face. There’s blood all over his hands too, and his fingers slip around on the trigger, scaring you. Of all the ways to go you think, this kid shooting you while you try to save his life. The German bodies around him, he shot them all. His eyes move up and down Captain Rogers and then up and down you and they’re wide, glassy. And he goes, “... you a Chinese?” 

“I’m American,” you say. Then, thinking of it: “Lollapalooza, all right?” It’s a word your grandpa couldn’t pronounce, hell: they use it in the Pacific Theater to prove they’re not Japs.

“This is _Captain_ America,” says Dugan, taking off his hat and holding it to his heart, like he’s about to recite the national anthem to Cap’s uniform.

“You’re safe,” says Captain America, moving slowly to stand by you.

“Me, I am French,” pipes up Dernier. Jones hits him on the shoulder.

“Am I in the movies,” Paul Welch says, and and his head tips back against the tree trunk and his gun falls down across one knee. He’s passed out. Barnes steps smartly forward and grabs the rifle.

You patch him up the best you can, finding out he’s fractured his skull and lost half his ear, hair plastered to his head by blood, along with the stomach wound. What can you do? You can’t leave him.

By maybe another miracle (#219), given the tendency of stomach wounds to go septic, Private Paul Welch winds up surviving the ride packed into the bed of the cart behind the tractor while you continue on to the Hydra convoy’s drop point. He lets you leave him in a hedgerow with one of the Germans’ captured guns. You warn him that German fire sounds different from American and, if he shoots, the Allies might think he’s a Kraut himself. You leave him the radio so he can keep listening for the sounds of orders from any nearby unit able to pick him up, but tell him not to transmit anymore. He says, after Rogers has left--he’s starstruck-- “Is Captain America gonna kill Hitler?”

You realize he can’t even be eighteen years old. He just seemed older all covered in blood, but with gauze wrapped around half his head he barely looks Davey’s age.

“Not today,” Barnes tells him, “so you better stick around.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at that, another chapter.  
> [Japanese students at Oberlin during WW II](http://oberlin.edu/alummag/fall2013/internmentstudents.html)  
> [Charlie and His Orchestra](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjbKagldhbA) (Winston Churchill listened and was amused, as well)  
> [Operation Dragoon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Dragoon)  
> [Recordings of signals Germans sent to jam radio transmissions](http://www.normanfield.com/jamming.htm)  
> [Real example of a wireless operator out in the field, Noor Inayat Khan (thank you, tumblr)](http://lilinternetwarrior.tumblr.com/post/123347856995/gottacatchemsome-faineemae-eggplantlit)  
> For some reason no one seems to go with Dugan's comic book history as a circus strongman, but why not, right?


	3. Chapter 3

It’s not all Hydra, especially not here in France. Some of the soldiers fighting on the German side are Russian and Ukrainian prisoners. They don’t want to be there. They surrender right away. You even saw one troop of them fire on their own German officer. And because the Germans are now on the run in France, you can afford to treat them with mercy. There’s one who stays quiet while you cut off his mangled hand and says ‘danke’ after, all polite. And then there’re some soldiers who curse at you, and sometimes you prefer that, without knowing why.

You’re a medic. You help whenever you can (even on Omaha beach, after a camera crew edges you out of Captain America’s shot--you beg off and go to pitch in with the Red Cross). Same as how you were part of the Amateur Radio Relay League back home and so you had to help out in case of disaster, natural or otherwise, or pass on messages from those in need.

In this war, sometimes they shoot at the red crosses medics wear on helmets or armbands. That’s how it goes.

You don’t wear your armband or the red cross on your helmet now you’re a Commando and not subject to regular rules. You and Barnes have talked it over and agree that Captain Rogers, with his shield and red and white stripes, is at risk of the same thing. But he wears them anyway.

In your book on radio the author writes an impassioned foreword. In it he says: amateur. Amateur means one who loves. Just purely in this thing for the love of it, amator, amador. One who wears his heart on his sleeve.

Now, the thing about the Amateur Radio Relay League is it was begun before the rules about two hundred meters and down. Two hundred meters, see, used to be the point at which amateur noise would interfere with Army or Navy communication during the first World War. Ingenious amateurs figured out that the seemingly useless hundred-meter band could still send messages, and then the eighty meters, and forty, too. Short waves are tricky. They have to be wooed. There are certain times of day when you can hear more clearly, when waves bounce between the ground and the stratosphere. Late at night is when shortwave grows loudest and most distinct in the hundred-meter band. Twenty and ten are dicey at any time. Eighty meters is always reliable. See: that’s how it is. It takes a miracle. It takes a certain bend to the light.

Shortwave radio is the story of those able to bend under restriction, to find the specific frequencies that align with solar positioning to send messages farther than any of you have ever thought. Or just as far as you’re allowed anyhow. So your messages don’t interfere.

Amateur radio has fought many battles even since the Great War ended. In 1929 and again in 1934: regulations on international third-party communication tightened. Limits on how far you could extend your reach. Fewer voices from Europe. The brief period of ecstatic transcontinental communication in Esperanto came to an end. At home you stopped hearing from New Zealand and Spain.

So shorter waves, and quieter, but always there. And even limited to communication with Americans you of course retained your membership in the Relay League, and your radio license. You passed on messages when wires went down. In a sprawling farmland your help came in handy. You helped in floods, or medical emergencies--that’s how you started to work with Dr. Watabe. And that is how you realized, very quietly, that you wanted to marry Mika. You realized it the way radio waves realize: only in certain hours, only in certain light, until finally they become steady and strong enough to send a message clear across the ocean.

* * *

 

You don’t get a letter from Mika until September of ‘44. There are many reasons for that, chief among them: she has become an Army nurse and deployed somewhere near the battle lines, you’re not sure where. Apparently her father had written you about that, but like many things in the war, the letter had gotten lost.

You met Mika when you were both kids. She’s younger than you are by two years and your families knew each other the way all the Japanese families in the county knew each other. You celebrated Girls’ and Boys’ Day with them. Your families are both Christian, so you know she’s among those you could consider and you go to the same church, and all. So you’d talk, a little.

But you were always--rough around the edges for some girls, not one to talk fancy to them and not one for anything you’d call real romancing. _She’d_ say different, but that came later. She finished high school early and went off to nursing school and came back in ‘38.

While she was gone you’d started going out on rounds with her father, who needed a hand. You said it was because you were interested in the science and wanted to learn, and it’s true, especially given what you relay over the radio. But when Mika came back, it was mostly that you liked being around her. She’s got a sharpness about her, a way of noticing things, that in your experience not many people do.

It’s a good thing too, that she notices things, because she says otherwise she’d never have noticed you looking at her.

It just took you two talking a lot about anatomy and the wild things she’d learned in school about medical cyclotron to cure cancer and roentgenograms--images made from rays that cut through the inside of your body the way radio waves cut through space. You told her about radio and she told you about medicine and eventually you worked up the courage to buy her a soda in town, and then a drink and a dance. And you realized that here was someone with whom you could talk, or not, and she’d understand you either way. What you both share is a sense of curiosity in the world. Outside, within.

 _Anatomy_. (The things she can talk about without blushing.)

And the nimbleness of your fingers, underneath their callouses, from working on the radio.

She liked that.

So when you get her letter you go to read it in private, under a moderately sized oak tree near the camp. You sit in the grass, which is rougher and shorter than the grass back home, razor-edged and thick with the husks of cicadas.

The cicadas in France that summer sound louder than the kind you had back home. Your grandfather called them _semi_ ; they had them in Japan, too. He remembers the sound from when he was a boy. There was a swarm in Fresno when you were a kid, in ‘27. The funny thing is the word’s similar in French. One night, while Jones is working with you on a German cipher to translate incoming orders to Hydra, he tells you it’s _cigale_. You almost can’t hear each other over the noise of the bugs and the crackle of machine gun fire just a few miles away. _Cigale_ , he says, there’s a story how it sang all summer while the ant worked. No danger of that for us, eh? Flipping through the code book for you.

Radio and cicadas and machine guns. Sometimes the crepitation of cicadas almost drowns out the distant rattle of gunfire. With your headphones on, it somewhat fades.

When you were younger you asked your grandfather why do _semi_ make that noise. Why do _we_ make noise? he asked you. For their women, likely. To be heard. Who knows? It’s noise! Everything alive makes noise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Facts about radio are taken from 1. my father, a member of the ARRL since the '60s, and 2. the excellent if occasionally bombastic book which Morita references, written in 1936, called [200 Meters & Down: The Story of Amateur Radio.](http://www.amazon.com/200-Meters-Down-Story-Amateur/dp/0872590011)


	4. Chapter 4

Seventy-five percent of German intelligence comes from intercepted radio transmissions. So you spend a lot of time learning to lie. Sometimes you send false broadcasts; often, on missions, you use sound equipment to broadcast the noise of troops larger than yours, to misdirect Hydra as to your location. At one point an officer who looks like Jack Palance comes up to your unit and goes,

“Hello, Captain America sir, can you please share with us the common songs you Commandos sing?”

“It’s Captain Rogers,” breaks in Barnes.

“You should see our kickline to The Star-Spangled Man,” Jones jokes, and Dugan says, “Yeah, we sing that a lot, but not with the same lyrics necessarily.”

The man who looks like Jack Palance goes, “We need to know because we’re going to be faking some radio traffic to confuse the Germans as to your location. We’re bigoted here, you understand, it’s Top Secret stuff. We’ve got ourself a Captain America of our own, you see. Ours can pick up tanks.” He smiles, like it’s a joke.

‘Bigoted’ means they’re in on the Plans. The stuff even you Commandos have to zip your lips about, to stay silent, the plans that come from high up as Eisenhower. They’ve been using that term since the leadup to the June attack on Normandy. There are several Captain Americas running around, of course. Only one is real, probably. But you never know.

* * *

 

Lies and libel. The Germans do a little radio skit of Captain America himself getting punched out by Hitler. It isn’t very funny. It doesn’t make you laugh. The Germans call Captain America a vaudeville nance.

Some of the things the Germans say are true.

A few months ago in a camp you heard--probably no one else did, just you and Barnes, who are both good at listening--you heard some soldiers going on about a queer who got the boot out of the army. Sergeant Barnes threw up right after he heard that. You looked at him. You thought: _oh_. You didn’t know what to say; what do you say about that? He’s been so friendly to you. You start to wonder about it. You wonder if he has Ideas about Orientals. You can’t help it.

* * *

 

Back home, you heard how after Pearl Harbor someone in Washington, D.C. cut down four cherry trees that were growing around the Tidal Basin, because they'd been a gift of Emperor Hirohito.

Captain America, the star-spangled man with the plan, has punched out Hitler over two hundred times. Steve Rogers, who is not Captain America, tells you about the USO tours at all of our prompting, and with suitable embarrassment. Sergeant Barnes in particular ribs him about it.

You wonder:

Why isn’t it ‘Let’s sock old Hirohito on the jaw?’

What bothers you is things like the Dr. Seuss cartoons, which show Hitler and Mussolini and next to them, just a figure labeled ‘Japan.’

If anyone would as you you’d say _yeah_ Hirohito’s an _ass_ , but it’s that they don’t even ask that. They just talk about the Japs.

Anyway. It’s not like ‘Let’s sock old Hitler on the jaw’ isn’t pretty silly anyhow. Even if people like Private Paul Welch seem to believe in the myth. People do: they believe in the Star-Spangled Man with the Plan. _You_ do. Even if he is a vaudeville nance.

* * *

 

After Sergeant Barnes falls, the Captain goes very quiet.

You all help him look. Unlike usual, when he (and Barnes) would circle back to check up on the rest of the Commandos, who aren’t quite as strong on the march, he just forges ahead. You are all hard-pressed to keep up. You try your best anyway. But there’s nothing. Just snow falling through silence.

You’re a medic with no body to tend. There’s nothing you can do.

There’s nothing you can say.

You try to keep up. But even Captain America can get frostbite, you reckon. At some point Phillips steps in, orders him to stop the search. Phillips’s voice on the radio is hollow. Cap starts to talk then. He rages over the radio while you listen. He sobs. He stares at you for a long bleak instant and you realize: Barnes told him you knew.

* * *

 

Some of the things the Germans say are true. The Valkyrie is real. The Nazis do have secret weapons.

You do think about your girl back home. You went a little wild, maybe, one night looking up at the faraway stars, listening to the cold clarity of radio chatter in the 100-meter band. It was a good night for one hundred meters, and you could hear from far away. You could hear the British joking around: _Miller promoted to full sergeant request full complement of beer stop_.

You wondered if Miller really existed. You wondered if it was false traffic to confuse the Germans.

So what happened was this: you wrote a letter to Mika and asked her to marry you, and she wrote back, _Jim, I can’t think straight where I am. I’m afraid of making a fast decision. I love you, but I can’t even see your face clearly at night anymore. I want to hear your voice again before I’m sure, I want to touch you. Please, Jim, let’s wait. Please, Jim, let’s wait until after the war._

At the time you felt as if something inside you had been very gently wound up and put away, like a coil of radio wire twisted tight on its spool.

But what you think reading between the lines now is this:

You think of what Sergeant Barnes said. He said to you, six weeks before he died, standing outside of an inn in Hungary, he said, _I just don’t make plans._ You realize: Mika is afraid for you. She is afraid a promise will be an end. She wants you to keep on going, even with your heart half-broken open, so you’ll make it through, so you’ll have something not to fight for, not _an engagement_ \--the same word you use for battle--not an engagement. Not something to fight for but something to listen for. An ongoing plea, a whisper that will keep on sounding in your ear. _Please Jim. Please Jim. Be careful. Wait. Let it be real. Let me see your face_. You realize: maybe, for you, there is hope.

Not for everyone. But for you.

The thing about plans is this: they never do pan out the way you want them to. You ride along in them like riding along in a car that is halfway falling apart. Just barely holding everything together, praying, and losing parts all down the road and putting them back together and hoping like heck you will make it to the place you want to go.

* * *

 

Some of the things the Germans say are true, but they don’t even have half the story.

 _What songs do the Commandos sing?_ asked the man who looked like Jack Palance.

There were many. You were a regular barbershop septet. But after Captain America goes down with the Valkyrie, the song you sing is _Auld Lang Syne_. It’s a Scottish song but it doesn’t matter where it came from. It doesn’t matter. What matters is your voices, their clumsy harmony, and the wish in them, carried high, high up in the cold air, bouncing between radio waves; a message heard far away, a song sung by so many people in so many places, for so many reasons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> -First of all, thanks so much to my small but dedicated contingent of readers for this fic. It has been a pleasure to write it, though the sheer volume of research I've done, compressed in so small a space, stil kind of staggers me.  
> -There will be a sequel to this work, set after the war, tentatively titled _Radio for the New Man_ , and very likely a third story after that, so don't worry--it's not over entirely  
> -'Bigoted' was the term used for those with detailed information about the D-Day plans.  
> -Speaking of which, [here](http://www.tofugu.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/signal-from-home.gif) is one of Dr. Seuss's many anti-Japanese cartoons.  
> -'The man who looks like Jack Palance' is a nod to the people in the [Ghost Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army), who would send fake radio traffic including even common songs units sang. This story ties in to If Neither Foes, in which there are multiple fake decoy Captain Americas. The 'can lift a tank' joke is because the Ghost Army used blow-up rubber tanks instead of real ones to confuse the Germans about the real number of American soldiers.  
> -By the way, if you want to see Morita talking to Bucky about his marriage proposal reply from Mika, see [Chapter Thirteen of If Neither Foes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3989410/chapters/10286817).


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